While Winchester’s words are reminiscent of the stock we writing professors put in the transformative capacities of language, . . . Foxworthy’s [joke] . . . reminds us that it is equally important to pay heed to the powers of language toharm and to misinform. (p. 172)

In other words, the third rhetorical aim I have observed is to warn that activist pedagogy, especially practices not critically examined with revisionary openness, can harm (as well as benefit) the very students an educator hopes to help.

Although this tradition of activist pedagogy and advocacy seems central in most issues in the last ten years of CCC and College English, my argument against assigning the memoir paper in first year composition classes appears to fly in the face of much that compositionists—and, in some cases, psychotherapists as well—hold dear about writing “as constitutive” (Berlin, 1990, p. 205), as constructive of a self, or revision of the self, through words. Katherine Kelleher Sohn (2003) compellingly argues that for the Appalachian women participating in her study of their literacy practices, “[o]bviously we want to bridge the gap from personal to academic writing, but beginning with the personal is a good first step, especially for nontraditional women (p. 435) . . . moving them from silence to voice” (p. 434). I too argue for that move from silence to voice, a move in which writing is constitutive or revisionary.